


How He Asked

by Mangokiwitropicalswirl



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2017-10-29
Packaged: 2019-01-07 02:44:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 4,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12224127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mangokiwitropicalswirl/pseuds/Mangokiwitropicalswirl
Summary: This series got going because of an ask about MSR Headcanons on Tumblr that started like this:Favourite headcanon for when Mulder proposed to Scully?The first time? Right before Father McHugh shows up in Redux II, when she’s in the hospital bed, both of them thinking she’s about to die. He doesn’t want her to die without knowing how much he loves her, and how when she’s gone he wants to be able to talk about her as his wife who died. He wants to be the widower he knows he’ll feel like.Then she got better, and she didn’t want to hold him to a promise that he probably made under stress and grief. And Mulder thinks she only said yes because she was on her deathbed. So they never talk about or bring it up for years. Until he asks her again.





	1. The First Time He Asked

**Author's Note:**

> This series got going because of an ask about MSR Headcanons on Tumblr that started like this: 
> 
> Favourite headcanon for when Mulder proposed to Scully?
> 
> The first time? Right before Father McHugh shows up in Redux II, when she’s in the hospital bed, both of them thinking she’s about to die. He doesn’t want her to die without knowing how much he loves her, and how when she’s gone he wants to be able to talk about her as his wife who died. He wants to be the widower he knows he’ll feel like.
> 
> Then she got better, and she didn’t want to hold him to a promise that he probably made under stress and grief. And Mulder thinks she only said yes because she was on her deathbed. So they never talk about or bring it up for years. Until he asks her again.

The words rush headlong out of his mouth before they’ve even fully formed in his brain.

“Scully, will you be my wife?”

His hand grips hers tighter against the scratchy hospital sheet and her sunken eyes widen. “Mul--”. His name is a half-whisper half out of her mouth so he just keeps going.

“You are my wife, you’re my...” he chokes back the lump in his throat, “in every way that matters.” He pauses, searching her face. “I don’t want you to go without...”. 

Now he’s the one who can’t finish, he can barely look at her through his tears, but he holds her gaze. The tears in her own eyes brim over and she nods a slow yes, her hair pooling in a sweaty mess against the pillow. Her other hand reaches to lace between the tangle of hands and fingers that are gripping one another as if he is keeping her from slipping over the edge of a cliff. He couldn’t be holding hers tighter if they were.

This is their cliff, and they’re jumping. 

“Yes,” Scully croaks hoarsely, her cracked lips turning up in a weak smile. “I will.” 

It registers faintly that he has asked the exactly right question. He didn’t ask, “will you marry me Scully.” No. There will not be a wedding, there will not be a marriage. They won’t slap a white robe over her dingy gown and parade together down to the chapel like the climactic scene of a rom-com. There won’t be a grocery store cake, or a family gathered to watch in her room as they weep their ways through some vows. 

But he has asked her the question she can, at this utter endpoint, say yes to. “Yes, Mulder, I will be your wife.” They’ll sign some papers, her mother can witness their signatures, and somehow they’ll get them filed before the ink dries on her death certificate and he heads to jail. 

This she can do, this is right. She is his wife, he’s her husband. It will help make his grief real once she’s gone, she can give him that. She wants to give him that now, more than anything.


	2. The Second Time He Asked

The second time he asked it was because he missed her and he wanted to make her laugh. Not really laugh so much as hear the pause in her breath as she rolled her eyes and ignored him.

She’d gotten good at ignoring him over the years, as skillful at dodging his innuendo as she was at pinpointing causes of death in an autopsy. Both required she know what to take seriously and what to overlook.

And now she was getting better at playing along. She’d gotten better -- miraculously wasn’t too strong a term -- and by the time she was back on her feet, back in the office, neither of them knew how to bring up the subject of his proposal. 

She was mortified that her guard had been so let down, that she’d let the fact of her dying override all other judgements. It wasn’t like her to waver like that, and looking back on the way she had softened so easily was faintly embarrassing.

He couldn’t ask again. He’d already done it once, so what was he supposed to do now? Bring it up over coffee? “Hey Scully, about that whole wife thing…”.

No. It was like walking around with your fly open. He was exposed, and now there was no easy way just to zip things back up and carry on.

She’s been gone for two days and it feels like months. It feels like the time she’s went missing and an indefinable ache had settled into his gut. But she’s not missing, and the ache is most definitely defined. It’s for her, for the raise of her eyebrow, for the clack of her heels on the linoleum floor, for the cadence of her contradiction, for the half-smile she gives him when he teases. 

The phone is wedged into the crook of his neck as on the other end, she rattles off a collection of paranormal phenomena. “Voodoo, Santeria, conjure, occult or pagan practices, witchcraft…”

He loves her. Crap. The knowledge presents itself bald-faced at moments like this, when they’re easy, when she’s playing along, when he remembers what it used to be like when there was no one on the other end of that line, when it was just him in a basement, shuffling through dust. He misses her, and she’s only been gone two days.

“Scully.” His voice in a faux seduction that’s not actually false. “Marry me.”

“I was hoping for something a little more helpful,” she sighs.

When they hang up the phone he smiles. Strike two. Too bad she doesn’t know how hard he’s swinging.


	3. The Third Time He Asked

The third time he asks, she says yes.

He doesn’t even remember exactly how he phrases the question, just the calm delight on her face as she nods, the setting sun catching on a sliver of her hair as she turns her face toward him.

He had brought her out to the island, to the summer house with its long green lawn and the path by the lake. It seems fitting to ask her here, in the place of his happiest memories -- of capture the flag with the neighborhood gang of preteens, of long swims in the bay, the whirring of locusts, the lightning bugs glowing bright between leaf-thick trees. He wants to knit her into this place, those memories, as if he can make up for the time it has taken them to finally get here by connecting her to everything good in his past.

She’s wearing a purple dress. It matches the profusion of lilacs that burst into bloom all over the island at this time of year. It’s so unlike her -- a delicate, almost shy color, a knee-length filmy gauze of a dress. It reminds him of the girls in Gatsby’s gardens, under the blue light and the fireflies and the stars. She walks just ahead of him and he can almost hear jazz in the breeze.

The excuse that he’d used for bringing her along was that he needed a date for Sam’s wedding. But it didn’t take much to persuade her. Ever since the night at the ballfield, he’s felt all the walls between them dissolving. She’s just waiting for him, he can feel it.

His mother has spent the past two days beaming, and his father’s customary gruffness has muted into a good-natured affability, gripping his brandy, pleased with everyone. Mulder hadn’t wanted to steal anyone’s thunder, so he waits until after the reception dies down and walks with her down to the water.

It bothers him now that he can’t quite remember what he says, how he phrases it. Come to think of it, he can’t quite remember the way that he kissed her. He can picture her mouth with its half-open smile and sense how his hands threaded themselves through the hair at the nape of her neck, pulling her toward him in a longed-for collision. He can remember the jolt through his bloodstream when he feels her mouth open to him, the way she seems to melt in his arms.

But what does he say? He can’t remember. It bothers him. He presses the memory, prodding it until it gives way.

 

The cold shock of waking is brutal, more like surfacing from under a fog than simply opening his eyes. And then he is baffled by dreams, of whole lives lived and died behind his eyelids. There’s a dream of a life with Diana. There’s this one, where Sam lives and he proposes to Scully at Quonochontaug on the day of her wedding. There are other dreams too, darker fates held out to him, betrayals, failures, compromises. 

He lays in his bed sorting them out, his mind buzzing with the endless intrusion of thoughts and the layers of each mind around him, every one vibrating with the tension between the real and the wished-for, some living their lives but not quite inhabiting them. It takes him awhile to let go, to settle for sure back into this fate, in the life where Samantha is gone and he cannot remember things he hasn’t yet said.


	4. The Fourth Time He Asked

The fourth time he asks, it’s not even formed as a question.

He doesn’t know it, but this is the moment she always remembers as the time that she says yes for real. The yes that she says in her gut. Not because she’s dying, not because she might lose him, but because she hasn’t, and she’s irrevocably, headlong in love with him. 

She’s poised under the arch of his doorway, and he’s here, back from delirium, back from another brink of disaster. His hands are on her cheeks as her eyes brim with tears. She is telling him all that she cannot explain, the mysteries that have shaken her faith to the core, and he hears her, knows what she needs him to say. 

“Scully, I was like you once, and I chose another path another life, one where I found my sister. But even when my world was unrecognizable and upside down, there was one thing that remained the same.”

She feels the pads of his thumbs stroke the tendrils of her hair from her forehead, feels like pulse in his fingers where it meets the warm pulse at her temple. His words transmit through her skin, into her bloodstream and down to the warm marrow of her bones.

“You were my friend, and you told me the truth. You are my constant. My touchstone.”

Her heart squeezes thick in her chest, a river at full flood, and her voice a whispered vow. “And you are mine.”

This doorframe is their chuppah, his hallway their aisle. They’ve already walked it here, to this point, dozens of times. Last summer, they’d almost walked all the way through, but that damn bee had taken her down, laid her out on the worn planks of his floor. She remembers laying there in a panic, the sharp needle sting puncturing any certainty that she would have followed that kiss to wherever it led. 

Now, at this moment, he’s doesn’t know that he’s asking, but she’s saying yes, pressing a kiss to his forehead and settling the cap on his head. She doubts he will ever outright revisit the question he asked her the day that she laid in her hospital bed. Whatever they are or become, it’s not going to look anything like what she had been taught to expect or desire. 

She was never romantic or giddy, but despite everything, she still believes in marriage. She still believes in commitment, in the making and keeping of promises. What occurs to her as she turns and walks back to the elevator is that she’s kept unsaid vows to him so many times over. She’s kept his secrets, broken the law for his life, spent nights in jail. She has already grieved for his life as his widow.

In her heart, she says yes to him now as a wife, whether or not he is asking. Whether or not he ever does.


	5. The Fifth Time He Asked

The fifth time he asks, his hands are in her hair at the crown of her head, threaded through her auburn strands, but not quite gripping as her tongue slowly drives him mad. His cock is in her mouth, and she’s humming, her hands on his quivering thighs. His eyes have rolled back and his own mouth drops open. 

“Oh my god, marry me woman,” he groans, his eyes drifting closed as she swirls the flat of her tongue up the underside of his rigid shaft.

Scully chuffs and looks up at him with a teasing pout, a gleam in her eyes, before she grips him firmly at the base with one hand and takes him in her mouth again, her cheeks hollowing out as she seems determined to suck his heart out through his dick.

“Oh. My. God. Scully.” His punctuates each word with a gasp and moves his hands from her hair, afraid he’ll lose control of them there, and instead curls his fingers around the lip of the classroom chair. 

Apparently the way to get Scully to succumb to an on-duty quickie is to start wondering aloud if they’re getting too old. Or maybe it was the way he had failed to dodge the cat-eyed glances of some pink-sweatered teenage girls. Whatever the cause, Scully is giving him head with all the vigor of a Catholic school girl who’s been storing up Cosmo’s best tips. 

This is all so incredibly new that every encounter between them is like entering an undiscovered country. They’ve been trying to keep things professional, separating their work from their trysts. At first, they’d agreed not to stay over on work nights, not mess around in on-duty hotels, and certainly not in the office. 

It’s been tricky. Nearly every night since New Year's, Scully has ended up on his couch as he’s learned where to touch her, and how, until she’s naked and writhing, calling his name and the deity’s with a wantonness he would previously have thought her too dignified for. 

Not that he’s been any better. On the nights they haven’t defiled his couch, they have christened her bed. He could cry just remembering the tenderness with which he kissed her there in her room. That had been the night she drove him back from the hospital, his arm in the sling, with the feeble excuse that he’d be more comfortable at her place than his. She led him into her room and settled him down, offered to help him out of his sling and his shirt, and then looked up at him with the world in her eyes. 

And now somehow they are here. In the after-school hush of a empty classroom, their workday long from over, and their hunger for one another not even a little bit sated. The rules and the boundaries they’re trying to maintain slip off them as easily as Mulder’s dress slacks had slipped to his knees when she’d pulled him into this deserted room and tugged eagerly at his belt. 

She had been in his bed this morning, a workday, and he’d woken her with his mouth at her breast, tickled her until she could barely breathe from laughing, and then slowly made love to her right up until they got the call to come down to the high school. They decided they could blame her tardiness on the traffic. Looking down at her now, he knows there aren’t enough traffic jams in the world to account for hours he will lose in her arms.

They’re not too old. The good part is just getting started.


	6. The Sixth Time He Asked

The sixth time he asks, she doesn’t hear him at first. He has to whisper it again in the darkness where the moon is casting a sliver of light over the heavy-log bed frame. 

“Scully,” he breathes low, pressing a kiss against her hairline. “Will you marry me?”

She turns toward him in the bed, pulling the covers down as she does, beckoning him in. Her eyes brim with tears as she looks up at him before resting her forehead against his. She takes a long breath.

“Is that really what you want?” Her voice is steady and measured. “The wife. The family. The white picket fence?”

“Is that what you think I want?” His question is genuine, soft.

“I just need to know what you’re thinking.” She pauses. “I mean, here you are talking about there being more to life, about there having to be an end, about me going home.”

“I meant what I said. There’s more to life than this.” Mulder swallows and smooths a thumb across her lips. “For both of us.”

Scully nods and presses a kiss to his lingering fingertips. “I just want to make sure you know what you’re asking for, what you really want.”

“Scully, I want you.” He pulls her closer against his chest. “I don’t know about all the rest of it, but I want you. Sometimes I think it’s the only thing I know for sure.”

She swallows a choked laugh and reaches to wipe a tear from her cheek before meeting his lips with hers. Her hands wind through his hair and pull him closer, their mouths opening slowly, the kiss blossoming in the pregnant silence.

Scully breaks the kiss and pulls back, resting her mouth next to his ear. “Then yes, Mulder. Let’s get married.”

“You thought I was never really going to ask again, didn’t you?” He chuckles.

“I had my doubts.” Scully smiles.

“That’s my Scully, always the skeptic,” he teases.

She weighs a snappy retort in her mind, but then softens, the full meaning of what they’ve just said to each other settling into her chest. “I am yours,” she whispers. “I have been for so long.”

She sees desire flare in his eyes as he pulls her close again, feels the power in his arms that he’s holding at bay. She can sense his restraint in the gentle caresses he is smoothing along her back and the crown of her head. 

But she doesn’t feel dizzy now, or chilled. She tilts her head to meet his gaze again, letting him see her intentions. She reaches for the top button of her blouse with one hand, and the zipper of his jeans with the other. He startles.

“Are you okay? Do you feel alright?” There’s concern in his voice. “We don’t have to, it’s okay. Just let me hold you.”

She shakes her head. “I’m fine now. Really. Please….” She can’t even name what she wants, but the please is more than enough. His eyes flare again and he captures her mouth, opening it with a groan of his own. 

They make love slowly in the wide wooden bed, under the dark of the Bellefleur forest, as if this were a homecoming, a missed chance recurring, a recovery of lost time.  
_____

When he returns months later, he can barely hear what she is saying to him there in his dusty apartment. Now she is heavy with the weight of miracles. He watches her mouth move, saying things he doesn’t know how to express. He doesn’t know how to keep promises now. His body holds memories his mind can’t quite access. He’s tired, and there are tears in her weary eyes. 

After she leaves, he settles down on the couch with his head in his hands. Did she say “it’s yours?” That can’t be, he thinks. The timing is off. He would have known. Before. She would have had symptoms, wouldn’t she?

He is a man returning from a journey to find all the landmarks have changed. Or like someone waking from a long sleep having forgotten their own name. 

It is weeks before he remembers their conversation in Bellefleur, and by now, he thinks, she must have wanted him to forget.


	7. The Seventh Time He Asked

It took seven years for them to kiss each other. It takes another seven to finally arrive right here. The sky’s an inky dark and the sand beneath their outstretched legs is growing cool.

When this suddenly occurs to her, Scully is reminded of a story from her school days, how Jacob worked for seven years to earn the hand of his beloved Rachel, and then worked seven more when her father married him to Leah first instead. She remembers how as a young girl it had seemed foolish to her for a man to ever have agreed to such a price, doubted that any woman could live up to that level of devotion. Doubted whether any woman could return it.

She glances sideways at the outline of Mulder’s jaw against the twilight sky, at his shoulders slightly raised as his elbows prop him up in the shifting sand. It’s one of those rare moments where she feels herself rise beyond herself and sees her life’s story — the tangles and tragedies, the serendipities and what feels like fate — as the inevitable engines that have brought her her deepest joy.

Her eyes brim as she remembers something she once said to him, on the night that William was conceived, “what if there was only one choice? And all the others were wrong?” She feels her heart soften and open up again, as surely as if someone has pushed open a door between locked rooms.

Mulder isn’t thinking of any of this as they lay back on the empty beach, naming the constellations rising out of the Caribbean sea outstretched in front of them. He draws his arm across the sky toward the Pleiades that cluster like a crown in a patch of milky sky. 

“They’re called the seven sisters, Scully.” He’s in show-and-tell mode now, she hears it in his voice. If he had a slide projector at his disposal he’d be launching into a planetarium display of astronomical proficiency. Scully smiles and moves closer toward him on her towel, the off-shore breeze pricking little goosebumps on her skin.

He’s animatedly sweeping his lanky arm in arcs across the horizon. She hears him call Aldebaran “the follower,” the star that forever follows the seven lights of the Pleiades through the sky. 

She sympathizes with a star.

She’s shivering and his voice has become a hum she feels more than hears. She’s beside him but elsewhere, wandering through memory. The memory of Jacob’s story makes her think of Ariel, the woman who married herself to a golem, her deceased fiancé, willing him to return to life together, no matter how disfigured or decayed. She thinks how at the time she had pitied Ariel but hadn’t understood. How she couldn’t simply let him be at peace had confused her. Wouldn’t stronger love allow her to let him go?

But Mulder had returned to her a corpse, a shell emptied of its former life, and watching him now, browned and healthy, a man at his peak, she understands. She too had made bargains with her God to buy him back, and every incantation that she knew would have been worth this moment. 

He’s oblivious to the circuits of her mind, just feels the pressure as her fingers glide between his own and squeeze. He turns toward her. 

“What is it?” He’s startled by the serious cast that’s fallen across her face, but confused too by the way she’s smiling, unfallen tears glinting in the faint light.

She shakes her head, unable to speak, swallowing the lump in her throat. He waits.

“I love you.” She pauses at each word, the simplicity of the phrase simultaneously too much and nowhere near enough.

He nods, leaning to cup her chin and kiss her softly. “I know, Scully.” He smooths his hand along her hair. “I know.” He senses that she’s holding back, that there’s more she wants to say. “Are you okay?”

“Mulder, you asked me something a long time ago, and I said yes.”

He holds his breath. They’ve never talked about how things had been between them before he was taken. Their world’s divided neatly into epochs — the bright time together before their lives were torn apart, and this murky darkness after. 

She continues. “I wonder if you would ever want to ask again?”

“Are you asking me to ask again?” He’s serious, but there’s a playful teasing lurking underneath.

She swallows and thinks about marrying him, about standing at the end of an aisle, about making vows. 

“Do you know that Catholics consider marriage one of seven sacraments?” Scully pulls a tactic from his own bag of tricks, deflection by discussion.

“I know there are seven deadly sins and seven corresponding virtues. I know there were seven wonders of the ancient world. I know that Muslims circle around the Kaaba seven times during the hajj. I know that the Spanish explorers went searching for the mythical seven cities of gold. I know that in Taoism…”.

“Mulder,” she laughs, stopping his rambling with a hand on his knee. “Marry me.”

He nods and draws her to him with a spreading grin. “What took you so long?”

“I wanted to get the timing right,” she whispers against his neck before pulling him into a passionate kiss. 

Together, their bodies reach for the earth. Mulder guides them down onto the blanket and Scully bends her knee to part his legs, pulling herself closer to his warmth as a dampening heat spreads from her center. After several moments of deepening kisses, Mulder pulls away and props up on his elbow. 

“I just thought of another,” he pauses, “in the traditional Jewish wedding ceremony the couple is given seven blessings.”

“What are they?” Scully’s voice is quiet, expectant.

“I don’t remember,” Mulder chuckles. “You would think with the number of weddings I went to as a kid I should. Maybe it’s the fact they’re all in Hebrew?”

“What do you remember?” 

She thinks of the vows she has heard friends make at a dozen different weddings. She thinks of in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad, forsaking all others, as long as you both shall live. She thinks that even though she has never said them, she’s lived them, maybe more than anyone she knows.

“There’s always one phrase that sticks in my mind, I think it’s from the Song of Songs?” His voice is quiet too, and almost reverent, as if the thousand stars themselves were witnesses.

“What’s that?”

He looks at her intently, taking both her hands in his as best he can. “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.”

Scully nods and swallows softly, following her sudden impulse to repeat him. “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.”

As his arms surround her and their mouths meet again, she remembers, too, that seven is the number of completion. That on the seventh day, after God made man and woman for one another -- for help, for comfort -- He looked at what He’d made and called it good. And finally rested.


End file.
